Wells Fargo chip analyst David Wong today writes that sales of notebook computers by “original design manufacturers” — parties such as Compal, Quanta, and Wistron that build the majority of the world’s computers — in November showed the first year-over-year rise since February for laptop computers, an encouraging sign.

“Sales for our notebook ODM aggregate (Compal, Quanta, Wistron, and Inventec) were up 5% yr/yr in November, after being down 3% yr/yr in October and down 13% yr/yr in September,” writes Wong. “This is the first month of year/year growth for this composite since February 2016.”

Wong calls this a “solid pickup” for the month, and a sign of “firmness” in the PC market.

On the desktop side, sales appear to have been down 1%, year over year, less bad than the 6% drop in October, he estimates, after excluding results from ODM Pegatron, whosesales are skewed by also making Apple‘s (AAPL) iPhone.

Shares of design software maker Autodesk (ADSK) are up 9 cents at $81.83, after Canaccord Genuity’s Richard Davis writes, after listening to the company’s analyst day presentation, that it’s time to raise the stock to Buy from Hold, with a $95 target, up from $70.

“Autodesk’s analyst day gave us enough detail that we can now create a legitimate financial path that takes us from an essentially breakeven calendar 2017 to at least $6 per share in free cash flow in calendar 2019,” he writes, “and very likely $11 in 2022.”

“We believe the shares could double in 3-4 years.”

Shares of chip maker Broadcom (AVGO) are up $7.43, or 4.3%, at $178.14, after the company yesterday afternoon beatfiscal Q4 expectations, and projected this quarter’s revenue higher as well.

Shares of fiber optics component supplier Finisar (FNSR) are up $1.18, or 3.5%, at $35.31, after the company this afternoon reportedfiscal Q2 revenue and profit that topped analysts’ expectations, and forecast revenue and profit this quarter higher as well.

Revenue in the three months ended in October rose 37%, year over year, to $369.9 million, yielding EPS of 58 cents.

Analysts had been modeling $364 million and 46 cents.

The company’s gross profit margin rose to 37.2% from 33.1% in the prior quarter.

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue of $378 million to $398 million and EPS of 58 cents to 64 cents, which is better than consensus for $378 million and 48 cents. Gross profit margin is expected in a range of 37% to 38%, on a non-GAAP basis.

CEO Jerry Rawls said that he was “pleased” with the results, which included “all-time quarterly records for revenues and profits in our second quarter.”

The company’s revenue growth came mostly from sales of “100G transceivers,” he said, referring to components for networks transmitting bits at 100 billion per second.

Rawls said the company also saw “strong” demand for “wavelength selective switch and ROADM line card products. Gross profit was helped by “favorable product mix and leverage achieved from our vertical integration with larger volumes.”

Shares of Broadcom (AVGO), a prominent supplier to Apple (AAPL), are up $4.46, or 2.6%, at $175.17, in late trading, after the company beat fiscal Q4 expectations, and projected this quarter’s revenue higher as well.

The company also announced it doubled its quarterly dividend as well.

Revenue in the three months ended in October rose to $4.15 billion, yielding EPS of $3.47.

That compares to consensus for $4.12 billion and $3.38 per share.

The company said its gross profit margin slipped from 54.2% a year earlier to 52.5% in the quarter.

CEO Hock Tan said the year had been “clearly transformative for our company,” and called the quarter a “strong” finish, citing 9% revenue growth from the prior quarter.

Broadcom said its new cash dividend will be $1.02 per share per quarter, payable on December 30th to shareholders of record as of December 16th.

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $4 billion to $4.15 billion, ahead of consensus for $3.96 billion.

In particular, he writes of having attended a “local event” that was put on by MapR, which is a privately held software tools vendor that has gotten $194 million in financing from Alphabet (GOOGL), among others.

Wood’s view is that MapR is perhaps a better way to go than the approach of Hortonworks and privately held Cloudera (backed by Intel (INTC), which both package the open-source “Hadoop” software platform with their services and support resources.

Privately held Dellthis morning reportedfiscalQ3 results, and CFO Tom Sweet was kind enough to talk with me by phone following the report.

Dell delivered $16.2 billion in revenue in the three months ended in October, or $16.8 billon, of one excludes intangibles that the company had to record as a one-time, non-cash charge, following its acquisition of storage giant EMC, as well as the latter’s controlling interest in virtualization software vendor VMware (VMW).

The jump in revenue, year over year, amounts to 28%, but the quarter includes 52 days of revenue from EMC and VMware.

I asked if there was any way to gauge the performance of “core” Dell, before the merger, or the pro-forma year-over-year change in the combined companies, but Sweet said “your numbers are going to be pretty distorted,” given the different lines of business.

He noted that the server business, along with networking, was down 8%, at $2.9 billion, with areas such as sales to “hyper-scale” data center operators proving “lumpy” given the nature of the sales cycle for that business.

Sales of client computing were up 3%, at $9.19 billion, which he characterized as “very good.”

In general, said Sweet, “We are doing what we said we would do,” which includes completing integration of EMC and VMware, and paying down debt. Dell has $47.28 billion in long-term debt, and repaid $7 billion in the quarter, and $5.8 billion since the EMC deal closed.

“We feel we are in a very good position,” Smith, as “the work we’ve done the last few years is beginning to hit home.”

Asked about the currently dismal outlook for selling gear to phone companies, Smith replied that “there are a number of concerns about customer M&A,” an allusion to things like AT&T‘s (T) proposed acquisition of Time Warner (TWX), “and spend,” but “we actually feel positive, we’re not seeing any pause in spending.”

Shares of fiber optics component vendor Acacia Communications (ACIA) are up 84 cents, or 1%, at $73.42, after Morgan Stanley‘s Meta Marshall this morning initiated coverage of the stock with an Equal Weight rating, and an $80 price target, writing that the company is “positioned to lead,” but that he’s worried about the stock valuation.

On the one hand, Acacia can take advantage as the fiber optics market moves to more “merchant silicon,” meaning, off-the-shelf components, rather than technology developed in-house by equipment vendors.

It’s just gotten too hard not to have standard silicon as networks have moved to speeds of 100 billion bits per second, writes Marshall, creating opportunity for Acacia:

Optical systems have traditionally been built with discrete components from vendors like LITE, FNSR, OCLR, and NPTN combined, with digital signal processor (DSP) ASICs (e.g. coherent) from optical systems vendors like CIEN, NOK, and INFN, run by proprietary software developed by the system vendors (see Exhibit 7 for more on the optical ecosystem). However, as the optical industry needed to upgrade to 100G speeds (starting with long haul), the optical technology to achieve that transition was more challenging (e.g. requiring sending multiple light beams at once). Not every systems vendor had the expertise to make this transition, creating an opportunity for a third party vendor to come in with a standard (“merchant”) solution. Acacia was able to capitalize on this need, taking an expertise in core optical, silicon, RF and software and exploiting Moore’s Law to create a high performance, low power, cost efficient optical photonic integrated chip (PIC) (consolidating >50 distinct photonic functions) and CMOS-based DSP ASIC. These solutions were adopted by third parties to enable their 100G transitions.

Now, the rise of cloud computing facilities is fueling the next leg of growth for Acacia, he believes:

UBS analyst Brent Thill today warns that most vendors of security technology are “feeling a pinch,” including Palo Alto Networks (PANW) Fortinet (FTNT), and Check Point (CHKP), as the big spending “binge,” by customers, in 2014 and 2015, is now definitely over.

Shares of Internet radio pioneers Pandora Media (P) are down 2 cents at $13.83, as the Street ponders the company’s unveiling yesterday of its paid streaming music offering, called simply “Pandora Premium,” and as talk of a buyout continuous.

The Premium service is expected to go live in Q1, the company told invitees at a gala event in New York City on Tuesday.

FBR & Co.’s Barton Crockett, who has a Market Perform rating on the stock, writes “Our initial take is that the new Premium service, in fact, looks different and appealing, potentially helpful for the fundamental outlook or M&A prospects, although we reserve final judgment until the service launches and we can test it out.” He thinks Pandora can reach 2 million subscribers in 2017.

Crockett notes the company’s integration of its recommendations capabilities:

Personalized recommendations seem lacking in other on-demand services, but a prominent feature of Pandora Premium. The landing page of the app includes a “thumbprint” playlist which automatically stores songs that a user has “thumbed up.” Pandora’s personalization engine is incorporated into the search bar as well–presenting different search results based on the user’s taste rather than results ranked by popularity. The most interesting feature to us was an “add more songs” button located at the end of a user’s playlist. By tapping this, a user adds an additional song to the playlist based on the selections already included in the list (determined by the music genome algorithm) as well as the user’s listening history. Visually, the app looks appealing to us, with an intuitive interface and nuances such as the app changing color based on the album artwork of the song the user is playing.

As far as M&A, you’ll recall that satellite radio operator Sirius (SIRI) has been one of the rumored acquirers, though CNBC‘s David Faber yesterday said other bidders were interested.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.